(WASHINGTON) — A man submerged up to his chin in brown, murky floodwaters and a group of miners covered head to toe in black soot — these are a few of the images featured at a new climate-inspired photography exhibit at the Kennedy Center called Coal + Ice, which opened on March 15.
“I had young kids, and I was trying to think about the kind of world they’d be living in. I felt this increasing responsibility to try to address climate change,” said Gideon Mendel, a 63-year-old photographer based in London, whose work is featured in the exhibit.
The display, running through April 22, features a spread of photos and videos taken across the globe and documents the harmful effects of human activity on the planet. It showcases the work of more than 50 photographers and videographers from around the world and the varying ways climate change manifests.
Coal + Ice comes to Washington, D.C. as reliance on fossil fuels has taken center stage amid the war in Ukraine. As the global market faces more significant uncertainty due to the volatile geopolitical landscape and dragging impacts of COVID-19, climate change has been pushed to the back burner.
“We have to walk and chew gum at the same time,” said Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister and president of the Asia Society Policy Institute that helped organize the exhibition.
“Dealing with geopolitics, dealing with the challenge to the inviability of national borders to be fundamentally violated in the invasion of Ukraine, and at the same time, wrestle with this pan-civilization challenge for climate change,” Rudd said.
Here in the United States, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked a debate on the sources of energy production at home. Many Republicans have called for an increase in oil and gas production to offset reliance on other nations, specifically Russia. In contrast, Democrats have pointed to this as evidence for a complete move away from non-renewable energies.
“It’s not looking good. It’s getting worse, and you know, at a time when the world needs actually a concerted global governance, to work together, it’s actually more fractured than it’s been for a long time,” said Mendel.
The exhibit allows viewers to walk around freely and move between “pods,” where individual collections provide an artistic exploration of the climate crisis. The content varies from scenes of coal mining operations worldwide to the rapidly melting glaciers of the Himalayas and photographs that chart their decline over the last few decades.
The 30,000 square-foot tent on the Kennedy Center’s “Reach Plaza” features a continuous background audio track that pairs with the visual displays to create an immersive experience for visitors.
Though the latest installation is on the doorstep of the government in Washington, D.C., there is concern about the exhibit’s impact.
“The danger with climate change groups, it just preached to the converted. You know, so you know, that’s, and you often have these closed circles. I mean, it’s really complex questions of how you use your work to bring about change,” said Mendel.
The exhibit makes its first appearance on the East Coast after initially debuting in Beijing in 2011, followed by showings in Yixian, Shanghai, Paris and San Francisco — the only other U.S. display. Smaller versions of Coal + Ice were also set up in Copenhagen and New Delhi. After the exhibition wraps, the organizers hope to take it to New York City, but have no official plans to do so.
If you’re looking for an activity you can enjoy with your grandparents, might we suggest digging through the ditches and burning through the witches?
An older woman showed in a viral TikTok video that rocking out to Rob Zombie‘s “Dragula” is an all-ages activity.
The clip shows the woman absolutely tearing through a rendition of “Dragula” at a North Dakota karaoke bar. In the caption, the user who posted the TikTok wrote, “I’ve never seen anything better than this,” while text on the video reads, “Grandma just killed Rob Zombie.”
Zombie himself hasn’t responded to the TikTok, but perhaps he’ll be inspired to bring out an extra-heavy performance of “Dragula” on his recently announced Freaks on Parade tour. The trek, which also features Mudvayne, Static-X and Powerman 5000 on the bill, launches in July.
(CINCINNATI) — The company that makes Jergens lotion is recalling select bottles of moisturizers due to possible bacterial contamination.
Kao USA Inc., based in Cincinnati, issued a voluntary recall on March 11 and is urging consumers to stop using Jergens® Ultra Healing Moisturizers that were packaged in three-ounce and 10-ounce bottles.
The company’s announcement, which was shared with the Food and Drug Administration, said affected moisturizers could be contaminated with the bacterium Pluralibacter gergoviae, “a bacterium which typically poses little medical risk to healthy people.”
Kao USA said it was recalling the lotions “as a precautionary measure” and that “people who have certain health problems such as weakened immune systems may be more susceptible to infections” when exposed to the bacterium.
Jergens’ manufacturer said the investigation into the matter is still ongoing and that it is notifying warehouses and retailers and working to pull affected products.
“Kao USA cares about our consumers’ safety, and we’re committed to manufacturing products that not only meet, but exceed, the highest industry standards,” Kao USA President Karen Frank said in a statement to Good Morning America. “As such, we promptly issued a voluntary recall of the affected product, and are proactively notifying consumers, removing it from warehouses, and working with retailers to ensure it is removed from store shelves. We have informed regulatory authorities, and further investigation to determine the scope of the issue is still ongoing. This remains our top priority, and we will continue to work with our partners on improved cleaning and sanitization practices so that similar issues can be prevented in the future.”
The recalled moisturizers were produced between Oct. 1 and Oct. 18 of last year, according to Kao USA. The lot codes for the units that were recalled all begin with the letters “ZU” and were printed in black type on the back of the bottles.
Look for lot codes:
3-ounce bottles:
ZU712851
ZU712861
ZU712871
ZU712881
ZU712911
ZU722881
ZU722851
10-ounce bottles:
ZU722741
ZU722771
ZU722781
ZU732781
ZU732791
ZU732801
ZU732811
ZU732821
Customers who have recalled lotion bottles can call or email Kao USA’s Customer Care Center for a postage-paid label and plastic bag to return the product and/or request a free product coupon at 1-800-742-8798 or consumer@kao.com. The company’s care center is open between Monday-Friday between 9 a.m.-5 p.m. ET.
Anyone who has used any recalled Jergens moisturizers and experienced an adverse reaction can also file a report with Kao USA’s Customer Care Center and the FDA’s MedWatch program at 888-463-6332 or online on the MedWatch website.
(WASHINGTON) — White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she has tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday, on the eve of President Joe Biden’s trip overseas.
Psaki said she was in meetings with Biden on Monday but that he tested negative Tuesday on a PCR test.
“I had two socially-distanced meetings with the President yesterday, and the President is not considered a close contact as defined by CDC guidance,” Psaki said in a statement.
Psaki said she has mild symptoms and she’ll “work from home and plan to return to work in person at the conclusion of a five-day isolation period and a negative test.”
Deputy press secretary Chris Meagher said no members of the press who attended Monday’s press briefing are considered to be close contacts. The White House is conducting contact tracing, he added.
This is the second time Psaki has tested positive for COVID-19. She first tested positive on Oct. 31, 2021.
Biden is traveling on Wednesday to Brussels to attend a NATO summit, meet with G-7 leaders and join a scheduled European Council Summit. Biden will then travel to Poland.
Carrie Underwood is blending drama and fun on her upcoming album.
The hit singer dropped her new single, “Ghost Story,” last week, a dramatic tale of a woman who promises to haunt the memory of her ex. “It’s enough of hopefully what people like about me. There’s some drama, it’s a cinematic song. It’s a great story song. It’s this little revenge song,” she describes the number to ET Canada.
“Ghost Story” is the first taste of Carrie’s anticipated seventh studio album following 2018’s Cry Pretty, her 2020 holiday album, My Gift, and the companion gospel project, My Savior, released in 2021. While “Ghost Story” offers a moody vibe, the singer hints that the album will also include lighter notes.
“It’s a very sing into your hairbrush in your house, in your room, kind of album,” she shares.
Days after its release, “Ghost Story” is climbing through the top 30 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart.
Over a month after giving birth to her son with Travis Scott, Kylie Jenner announced that they’ve changed his name.
“FYI our sons [sic] name isn’t Wolf anymore,” the Kylie Cosmetics founder shared in an Instagram Story on Monday evening. “We just really didn’t feel like it was him.”
“Just wanted to share because I keep seeing Wolf everywhere,” she explained, adding the praying hands emoji.
Kylie didn’t reveal her son’s new name.
Kylie and Travis welcomed their son on February 2, 2022. The baby boy joins big sister Stormi, who turned four the day before her brother was born. The couple first revealed their son’s name as Wolf Webster about a week after he was born.
The name change announcement came hours after Kylie and Travis released a 10-minute YouTube montage titled “To Our Son,” where the proud parents reveal clips from throughout Kylie’s pregnancy all the way up to the birth. Messages from family members — including Kylie’s mom Kris Jenner and Travis’ mom Wanda Webster — are interspersed as well.
(WARSAW, Poland) — President Joe Biden’s high-stakes summit with other NATO leaders on Thursday will be one of the most scrutinized meetings on the world stage in decades, and could have enormous implications for both the war in Ukraine and the global balance of power.
Despite calls from Ukraine to do more to help stave off Russia’s ruthless invasion, Biden has erred on the side of caution — wary of escalating the conflict by drawing in U.S. forces as part of a more direct NATO response. But after nearly a month of fighting, some foreign policy and national security experts ABC News spoke to say it may be time for the alliance to take on a more direct role.
Preparing for ‘the worst case’
Since before the fighting broke out, Biden has insisted that American troops would not fight Russian forces inside Ukraine, warning that going head-to-head would lead to “a third world war.”
But Barry Pavel, a former National Security Council senior official during the Bush and Obama administration and the senior vice president and director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, says that’s far from inevitable.
“There have been other cases where U.S. and Russian forces have unfortunately come into friction and World War III didn’t start,” Pavel said, characterizing the strategy as simplistic. “There are hundreds of options that could be done between what NATO is doing now and risking World War III.”
The greater threat, warns Pavel, might be in leaving Putin unchecked.
“If he is emboldened by success in Ukraine, then he will be more aggressive in his efforts to nibble and to move into areas of perceived weakness in NATO members,” he said. “If he achieves his goal, you’ll have Russian forces on the borders of seven NATO members, including nuclear forces in Belarus, and so he’ll use that new posture to really heighten European insecurity to a great degree.”
And it isn’t Biden’s — or NATO’s — choice alone. Moscow could also escalate the conflict by striking a NATO member, either intentionally or accidentally, triggering a sweeping response.
“Article 5 — in the most basic sense — is NATO’s ‘Three Musketeers’ provision, which is to say, ‘all for one and one for all’ — an attack against any member is an attack against every member of NATO,” said Sean Monaghan, a former civil servant in the U.K. Ministry of Defence and a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, calling it “the most important red line in international politics.”
“This is a contingency that NATO forces are already preparing for,” said Monaghan. “That’s what the military does — prepare for the worst case.”
While the response to a Russian strike wouldn’t necessarily need to be eye for an eye, Monaghan says in theory, the alliance would be obligated to provide “an overwhelming response” if any member state was hit.
“The practice, some would say that NATO being collective of 30 nations, that have to reach consensus for any actions to be to be taken, that might hinder a response. But I think in this conflict, NATO has shown itself to be quite a lot more resolute and speedier of action than many people would have predicted,” he added.
The next phase for NATO
While the Biden administration has underscored the power of NATO’s overwhelming unity in the face of Russian aggression, when it comes to charting a path forward to counter the Kremlin, cracks within the alliance are beginning to emerge. While the summit will be an opportunity for the powers to get on the same page, it may also cast a spotlight on areas of disagreement.
For instance, Poland plans to propose a peacekeeping mission to Ukraine — a move the U.S. has effectively ruled out. Article 5 lays plain that an attack on a member merits a response, but will the alliance retaliate if Russia resorts to chemical weapons in Ukraine? And while NATO may not be willing to establish a no-fly zone over the country, Pavel says that doesn’t mean there isn’t a debate to be had about what more can be done to help the country defend its own airspace.
“In terms of the weapons pipeline, we should be doing much more. We can’t let the Ukrainians fly aircraft in their own defense? Forget these ridiculous restrictions on what equipment we can provide a sovereign country who asks for it to defend themselves against an invading force” he said, referencing the U.S. and other allies’ hesitancy to hand over fighter jets to Ukraine for fear of Russian retaliation.
Pavel added that additional anti-aircraft and anti-ship weaponry, as well as enhanced intelligence support and humanitarian aid on the ground, could go a long way in resistance efforts.
Thomas Graham, a former NSC senior director for Russia and a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says that beyond discussing support for Ukraine, NATO leaders should use the upcoming summit to make sharpen their signaling to the Kremlin.
“NATO leaders want to make sure that they’ve done everything that they can in order to deter the Russians,” he said. “Have we augmented the forces in Eastern Europe to the appropriate levels? And have we convinced the Russians that in fact we are determined to honor the Article Five guarantee and protect every inch of NATO territory?”
Monahan predicts this week’s gathering will result in a reversal to a mindset not seen since the days of the Soviet Union.
“We can foresee it as the beginning of a step change, almost a return to NATO’s Cold War posture of, if not territorial defense, then a much increased forward presence designed to deter a Russian regime that is clearly willing to resort to war” he said.
Battle lines of the future
Beyond addressing the immediate crisis, experts say NATO must ensure it is ready to respond to a more aggressive Russia and prepare for the new geopolitical frontier it is forging.
“The war in Ukraine will end at some point will end, but Russia will remain,” said Graham. “And what the conflict has demonstrated is that the hopes we had had for integrating Russia into the Euro-Atlantic community are dead.”
Pavel says plotting out a strategy not only for ending the conflict — but for managing exactly how the conflict ends — will be critical.
“When wars have ended in the past, the new boundaries have been drawn where the force set, through the middle of Germany, through the middle of Berlin,” Pavel said. “When the dust settles, where do we want Russian forces to be and where do we want Ukrainian and potentially NATO forces to be?”
Another repercussion may be an onslaught of arms races. Russia’s alleged deployment of hypersonic missiles — a technology the U.S. has not yet mastered — is an area of competition, but Pavel says it’s not the only one.
“Putin has spent 10, 15 years modernizing the Russian nuclear forces — a lot of new types of exotic Russian nuclear weapons, pretty significant,” he said. “Certainly, the U.S. and some NATO members have nuclear capabilities, but they are aging. They have not been modernized at the pace that we should be doing.”
“All of this means that we’ll have we’ll have a lot more to do, unfortunately, on the security agenda going forward,” Pavel added.
(SAN JOSE, Calif.) — The criminal fraud trial of Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the ex-boyfriend of convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and a top executive at the blood-testing company, is expected to begin Tuesday in California after a series of COVID-19 related delays.
Balwani’s trial was first pushed back in January by the surge of omicron cases and then again last week when it was discovered someone who attended jury selection was exposed to someone who tested positive for COVID-19.
On Monday, juror No. 1 was excused after reporting a fever and a sore throat to the court and replaced by an alternate.
Federal prosecutors will take the floor first to give their opening statement, and then lawyers for Balwani will have a chance to unveil their defense.
Balwani’s trial is being held in the same San Jose courthouse where Holmes was convicted earlier this year. He’s also facing the same charges: two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 10 counts of wire fraud.
He has pleaded not guilty to all counts and could face decades in prison if convicted.
The government alleges Holmes and Balwani perpetrated a yearslong scheme to defraud investors and patients by intentionally misleading people about the capabilities of their blood-testing technology.
A federal jury found Holmes guilty on four counts of fraud in January. The 38-year-old is scheduled to be sentenced in September after the expected conclusion of Balwani’s trial.
The pair was originally charged in the same case, but their trials were severed after Holmes revealed she planned to testify that Balwani subjected her to mental and physical abuse. She held back tears on the stand in December as she told the jury that Balwani forced her to have sex and “impacted everything about who I was.”
Balwani firmly denied the allegations in a filing.
A Holmes juror exclusively told ABC that the jury largely disregarded the emotional testimony in deliberations.
Holmes also testified to the Silicon Valley jury that Balwani ran the day-to-day lab operations and took care of company’s financials.
But juror No. 6 told ABC News that the jury convicted Holmes regardless because “everything went through her.”
Theranos was the brainchild of 19-year-old Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford to pour herself into building the blood-testing business. Her company later created a miniature device dubbed the “Edison,” which investor witnesses at her trial said they believed could run any blood test.
Holmes paraded the novel technology to the likes of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the DeVos family, raising hundreds of millions of dollars.
By 2013, the Silicon Valley startup began to roll out its testing to Walgreens stores, with plans to expand nationwide. Holmes also recruited several prominent people to sit on her board of directors including Gen. James Mattis and former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.
But Theranos came under fire in October 2015 when a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed less than 10% of the company’s blood tests were ran on the Edison, according to the report.
Three years later, in March 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against Holmes, Balwani and Theranos, claiming they had fraudulently raised more than $700 million from investors.
Federal prosecutors later filed criminal charges against the former couple.
If you like to spend time on streaming services checking out the music your older brothers and sisters or your parents listened to, we’ve got the perfect tour for you.
The I Love the 90’s Tour, a celebration of all things musical and pre-Millennial, gets underway June 14 in San Diego, CA. The 20 announced dates run through an October 8 show in Evansville, IN, but more dates are expected to be announced in the near future. Tickets go on sale to the general public on March 24 at ilovethe90stour.com.
You can also check the tour website to find out who’s playing on each date, because there’s a huge rolling lineup that includes Vanilla Ice, Tone Loc, Six Mix-a-Lot, Color Me Badd, Coolio, All-4-One, 2 Live Crew, Sugar Ray‘s Mark McGrath, Treach of Naughty by Nature, C+C Music Factory featuring Freedom Williams, Montell Jordan, Kid ‘n Play and more.
“Ice is back, and so is The I Love the 90’s Tour… FINALLY,” says Vanilla Ice in a statement. “We’ve been waiting what seems like forever for the chance to hit your town LIVE and IN PERSON, and I know you have too — so you better get in where you fit in and get back to the 90’s where the party never stops!”
Get ready to relive your youth once more, because The I Love the 90’s Tour is back.
The celebration of all things pre-Millennial gets underway June 14 in San Diego, CA. The 20 announced dates run through an October 8 show in Evansville, IN, but more dates are expected to be announced in the near future. Tickets go on sale to the general public on March 24 at ilovethe90stour.com.
You can also check the tour website to find out who’s playing on each date, because there’s a huge rolling lineup that includes Vanilla Ice, Tone Loc, Six Mix-a-Lot, Color Me Badd, Coolio, All-4-One, 2 Live Crew, Sugar Ray‘s Mark McGrath, Treach of Naughty by Nature, C+C Music Factory featuring Freedom Williams, Montell Jordan, Kid ‘n Play and more.
“Ice is back, and so is The I Love the 90’s Tour… FINALLY,” says Vanilla Ice in a statement. “We’ve been waiting what seems like forever for the chance to hit your town LIVE and IN PERSON, and I know you have too — so you better get in where you fit in and get back to the 90’s where the party never stops!”
